Tag: health care

Special Delivery! Old Problems in New Packaging. Consumers were shocked when the San Francisco Gate broke a story about workers dying of an incurable lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans. Treatable only by a lung transplant, the chemical diacetyl was found to be the source of cellular degradation. Used to flavor microwave popcorn and responsible for […]

Physicians today are faced with a problem in diagnostics that was historically rare rare in medical science. Formally, disease and injuries affected single organs or bodily systems. Today, the frequency of multi-system illness has led to remarkable discoveries in areas of autoimmune disease and the origins of multiple organ failure. A frequent cause of both […]

New York City and vicinity has the best of everything and the worst of everything, a fact to which all great cities can attest. In New York, I’ve been able to have rarely diagnosed conditions identified through the perseverance of someone born to the theme of “I can do this!” Expertise is all around us […]

The USA has a very important system of support for Americans who have long believed that we must live beyond our sixty-plus hour work-weeks in order to actually enjoy retirement. It is truly at the heart of any discussion of our work habits. While US citizens are among the hardest working individuals in the western […]

I dispensed with Wednesday this week. It isn’t as if it is anyone’s favorite day so I doubt it was sorely missed. I’m recuperating from surgery for “ductal carcinoma in-situ” or DCIS, the most common form of breast cancer. That puts me among the one in eight women who can expect to be diagnosed with […]

The NY Times sports this editorial in today’s paper entitled, “Mr. Obama’s Health Care Challenge“. The President, a socialist to the ‘Far Right’ and an appeasement president as far as ‘The Left’ is concerned, threw out a reasonable offer to the rabid dogs hellbent upon denying Americans health care. This is problematic in principle since […]

Nobel prize-winning economist Professor Paul Krugman wrote his opinion of where the President might take the theme of his State of the Union address. The theme of concern was “competitiveness”. The column was of particular interest to me because my entire life was disrupted by a myth that we practiced capitalism in this country even […]

The New York Times published their tepid account of the actions of the House of Representatives actions to pass a ‘repeal’ of health care even though all involved knew that it would not become law. Where is the outrage? Why is the bid to remove, rather than improve health care for the masses considered to […]

Several articles stood out in recent weeks as typical of the manner in which public opinion can be swayed by a press corp which is overly impressed with the dramatic license taken by news figures. In an astonishing lack of respect for the intelligence of its audience, journalists today feel compelled to allow ‘news-worthy’ individuals […]

How does one debate the subject of life and death? Really, what are we pretending is happening here? Either access to medical care is a basic right of citizens in a civilized society or it’s a privilege restricted to middle and upper income level consumers (until such time as it’s withdrawn by those conferring the […]